Poetry: Fugitive

What is the language of a fugitive? And who deems who someone marked by such a name? Through erasure, Smith moves through these questions, navigating what it means to be a woman, a body at odds with the state for its machinery. A body that could, at will, be anything: a garden, rushing water, a field of want.

 


 

Fugitive

 


Penda Smith

Pendambaye Z Smith is a writer/educator/scholar invested in the ways eroticism is a tactic of survival, resistance, and refusal. She is interested in the ways erotic resistance appears in historicalpresentfuture Black life. She is a Watering Hole fellow, forthcoming Cave Canem, Pink Door Fellow, and has work featured in Rattle Magazine, Root Work Journal, ASAP/ Journal, Interim Poetics, Decomp Magazine, Voicemail Poems, and Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging Journal. She is a 2nd year MFA candidate at Louisiana State University. When she is not writing, she is playing with her kitty cat Zoro Neale Hurston, cooking, napping, dancing or reading.

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